John Harold Rogers, former senior adviser for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors Sentenced To Federal Prison
“The United States entrusted Rogers with its most sensitive economic data,” said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg. “He violated that sacred trust and lied repeatedly to conceal his collaboration with individuals in China with ties to the Chinese Communist Party, exposing his own country, the United States, to counterintelligence risks.”
“John Rogers spent years secretly funneling sensitive Federal Reserve information to Chinese spies, then looked investigators in the eye and lied about it. And when that wasn’t enough, he lied again under oath at trial,” said U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro for the District of Columbia. “Federal Reserve employees entrusted with America’s most sensitive economic information cannot sell out their country and their colleagues for personal gain and then expect to hide behind a single word.”
“When Rogers made the decision to share sensitive economic information from the Federal Reserve and give it to China’s intelligence service for personal gain, he betrayed both his country and his oath as a federal employee,” said Roman Rozhavsky of the FBI’s Counterintelligence and Espionage Division. “As this case makes clear, the Chinese Communist Party is employing increasingly aggressive tactics in its campaign to gain a strategic economic advantage over the U.S. by targeting our financial policies, trade secrets, and innovation. However, this sentencing underscores the FBI’s unwavering commitment to pursuing anyone who threatens our economic and national security and bringing them to justice.”
“John Rogers deliberately lied to our investigators to conceal the fact he shared restricted non-public Federal Reserve information with intelligence agents working for China,” said Michael E. Horowitz, Inspector General for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “Today’s sentencing sends a clear message that those who mislead and obstruct federal agents will be brought to justice. I commend the U.S. Attorney’s Office, our agents, and our federal law enforcement partners for their hard work and persistence, which led to this result.”
“While holding a position of trust, Rogers repeatedly violated Federal Reserve information security policies by taking sensitive, nonpublic information and sending it to himself, while he was in China, and to others affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party,” said FBI Special Agent in Charge Daniel Wierzbicki of the Washington Field Office's Counterintelligence and Cyber Division. “Rogers then lied to federal agents about these disclosures. His sentencing underscores the shared commitment of the FBI and the Federal Reserve Board Office of Inspector General to pursue anyone who endangers U.S. economic and national security by passing confidential information to an adversarial government.”
A federal jury deliberated for two days before finding Rogers guilty on February 3 of making false statements to government investigators at the Office of Inspector General for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
In addition to the 38-month prison sentence, Judge Dabney Friedrich ordered Rogers to serve 12 months of supervised release. Federal prosecutors had requested a 60-month prison term.
Rogers, of Vienna, Virginia, is a U.S. citizen who holds a Ph.D. in economics.
According to court papers, Rogers served for decades as a Senior Advisor at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, where he had access to restricted, nonpublic information about monetary policy and the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). From 2010 until 2021, Rogers worked as a senior adviser in FRB’s Division of International Finance where he was entrusted with confidential FRB information.
Beginning in 2017, Rogers developed a clandestine relationship with Hummin Lee, a Chinese intelligence operative, whom he met at a conference in China. Over the following years, Rogers met Lee and associates in hotel rooms in China under the guise of teaching academic “classes,” using the sessions to convey Federal Reserve information that Lee had specifically tasked him to collect.
Rogers printed restricted documents to bring on a trip to China, stripped classification markings from materials before emailing them to his personal account, and forwarded sensitive information to a professor at Fudan University, a Chinese state-run institution, days before meeting Lee. Rogers understood that Lee was writing reports for the Chinese government using the information he provided, and knew China could use advance knowledge of Federal Reserve interest rate decisions to generate enormous profits trading its roughly $1.5 trillion in U.S. Treasury securities.
In exchange, Rogers received help with his new wife, university professorships, and substantial financial benefits from Lee and Chinese universities. He told investigators he “owed everything” to Hummin Lee.
On Feb. 4, 2020, Rogers agreed to be interviewed by investigators from the Federal Reserve’s Office of Inspector General. When asked directly whether he had ever shared restricted Federal Reserve information outside the Board, he answered: “Never.”
The investigation was conducted by the FBI Washington Field Office and the Federal Reserve Board Office of Inspector General.
The matter was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Adam Barry and Jocelyn Ballantine, Trial Attorneys Nicholas O. Hunter and Yifei Zheng of the National Security Division, and Paralegal Specialist Derra McQuaig of the National Security Division.
Former Google Engineer Found Guilty of Economic Espionage and Theft of Confidential AI Technology
A federal jury in San Francisco has convicted former Google software engineer Linwei Ding, also known as Leon Ding, 38, on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft of trade secrets for stealing thousands of pages of confidential information containing Google’s trade secrets related to artificial intelligence technology for the benefit of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The jury’s verdict follows an 11-day trial before U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria for the Northern District of California.
The Moonlighter
A former Google software engineer has been convicted of trade secrets theft and economic espionage in connection with his efforts to launch a start-up in his native China. The Wire China sat in on Ding Linwei’s trial in San Francisco.
His product was a networking solution that could harness thousands of artificial intelligence chips into a single powerful supercomputer — the kind of technology that China, in its drive to win the AI race, covets.
On a slide displayed behind him, Ding laid out a bold claim: “Fewer than 10 people worldwide have built or can build tens-of-thousands-of-cards compute platforms. Mr. Ding Linwei is one of them.”
What Ding did not disclose to the audience that day was that he was living a double life.
At the same time he was growing his company, Zhisuan Technology, in Beijing, Ding was also an employee at Google — a mid-level software engineer known to his colleagues as Leon, working at the tech giant’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, California. Nor did Google know that Ding was moonlighting as a startup founder in China, pitching investors and claiming expertise over some of Google’s most valuable assets.
What happened next would culminate in one of the most high-profile China-related indictments of the Biden administration.
On December 29, about a month after Ding’s presentation, security officials at Google received a tip about Ding’s activities in Beijing. As investigators reviewed activity logs from his work laptop, they discovered that Ding had uploaded hundreds of files to a personal Gmail account. Many of those files had names that matched internal codenames for Google’s most advanced AI chips.
Within days, Google passed this information to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. On January 6 2024, Ding awoke at 6am to the sound of loud knocking at his front door. Half dressed and without his glasses, he shuffled out of his bedroom. He hadn’t made it downstairs before the battering ram broke through the door. No fewer than 18 officers rushed inside, detaining and handcuffing Ding at gunpoint before turning over his home and confiscating his passport.
There are things about Ding’s behavior that you see in other cases, but not quite as blatantly. He advertised Google’s software in China. He went on a marketing spree, looking for investment and advertising the technology that he allegedly stole.
Two months later, federal prosecutors in San Francisco charged Ding with four counts of trade secrets theft. An updated indictment later charged him with an additional three counts of trade secrets theft and seven counts of an even more serious charge: economic espionage. Prosecutors alleged Ding stole 105 trade secrets and uploaded over 1,200 documents totalling more than 14,000 pages.
At the time Ding was charged, the Justice Department ensured the case received maximum publicity. Top officials from then-attorney general Merrick Garland to then-FBI director Christopher Wray commented publicly on the case.
During both the first Trump and Biden administrations, top law enforcement officials had sounded the alarm about the threat of Chinese economic espionage. But prosecuting such cases had become politically fraught. A series of mostly failed prosecutions of U.S. academics of Chinese origin in the first Trump administration — part of the so-called ‘China Initiative’ — were criticized by rights groups.
In 2022, the Biden administration ended the China Initiative, emphasizing that it would go after Chinese economic espionage in other ways. Ding’s case was exactly the kind of alleged brazen theft — involving a critical technology at a critical U.S. company — that the Justice Department wanted to focus on.
“There are things about Ding’s behavior that you see in other cases, but not quite as blatantly,” says Nicholas Eftimiades, a former defense department official who tracks Chinese economic espionage cases. “He advertised Google’s software in China. He went on a marketing spree, looking for investment and advertising the technology that he allegedly stole.”
Now, two years later, Ding has had his day in court. The 38-year-old pleaded not guilty to all charges and received a three-week jury trial in San Francisco in January.
In opening arguments, Ding’s attorneys sought to paint a very different story. In their account, Ding was being persecuted by the government and Google for following a common path for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs — namely, for looking to start his own company while having one foot out the door at his big tech employer. What notes Ding did copy, his lawyers say, were personal notes intended to help him retain knowledge of the work he had done at Google.
Prosecutors offered no evidence that Ding forwarded the alleged trade secrets to anybody, nor that he opened the notes after uploading them to his personal Gmail account.
“This case is about power. It’s about what happens when two powerful entities come together and target a single individual,” defense attorney Lora Krsulich told the jury. “Yes, Linwei took notes. Yes, he started a business in China. But what is the connection between those two things?
“You’ll hear no evidence that he used the technology to harm Google, or that they involved military technology, or transferred that information to the Communist Party,” she further told the jury. “While that might make for a more interesting story, that’s not what happened here.”
“You are not here to decide whether Linwei was a bad employee,” she continued. “You can be a bad employee. That is not a crime.”
The governments’ lawyers, for their part, have sought to dispel any notion that Ding was being prosecuted because of his nationality.
“It is not a crime to leave a big company like Google and start a business, and it is not a crime to leave a company and start your own business in China. It is not a crime to want to help China succeed,” said assistant U.S. attorney Casey Boome. “What you can’t do is take proprietary technology that doesn’t belong to you, that you didn’t create, build a business and then offer to help a foreign government build the very same technology you stole.
“The defendant wanted more in his career than what he had. So he stole and lied to make himself rich, make his company successful, and to help government-controlled organizations in China meet their AI technology goals.”
FROM DALIAN TO SILICON VALLEY
By the time Ding joined Google in 2019, the software engineer had built a respectable CV in the U.S. chip industry. Born in China, he finished college at the Dalian Institute of Technology in 2010 and moved to California at age 23.
After earning a master’s degree from the University of Southern California, Ding worked at Marvell Semiconductor and Cadence Design Systems — leading U.S. firms focused on chip design. In 2018, he bought a townhouse in a heavily Asian suburb in San Francisco’s East Bay area. The following year he started at Google, 20 minutes down the road in Sunnyvale.
From his first day at Google, Ding was a diligent notetaker. In the Notes app on his company-assigned MacBook Pro, he jotted copious records about his work and his personal life. One note summarized a self-help book. In another, titled “Soft skills”, he wrote: “You need to [cooperate], so you have to communicate rather than criticize. You have to build your communication.”
He also took notes about his work, which involved developing data centers and other AI infrastructure that was becoming increasingly central to Google’s business.
AI runs deep in Google’s DNA. Researchers at the company were responsible for a seminal 2017 paper that is credited with ushering in the AI boom. Google engineers also invented their own in-house chip called the Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU. Unlike graphics processing units, or GPUs, that were popularized by Nvidia and AMD for purposes such as gaming, Google’s TPUs were purpose-built for AI. TPUs have been used to train Google’s large language model, Gemini, and are rented to other AI companies including Anthropic, Microsoft and Apple.
At Google, Ding worked on Google TPUs as well as Nvidia GPUs, giving him access to internal documentation on how the chips were designed and configured. One of the issues he worked on was a kind of networking technology called ‘clustering’. Modern AI models are so large that it’s impossible to fit them onto an individual chip. Clustering involves stringing thousands of chips together so that engineers can break massive AI tasks into manageable pieces that can be spread out and solved simultaneously. Clustering allows engineers to slash training times for a model from years to possibly weeks.
On his work laptop, Ding made copious records of documents related to TPUs, GPUs and high-speed networking technology. Over time, his process developed into a pattern: from Google’s confidential intranet, called Moma, Ding would grab text or screenshots and save them in an Apple Notes document on his Macbook.
A year into Ding’s new job at Google, things seemed to be going smoothly. He and his wife had recently had a child. He was also in the final stages of earning his U.S. green card. He was working on some of Google’s most important technology. Yet Ding did not seem fulfilled.
In August 2020, he began communicating with a recruiter in China named Julian Li over WeChat. The conversation petered off, then picked back up again the following May, when Ding sent Li a resume. From 2021 to early 2022, Li connected Ding with six companies in China, to little avail.
After one rejection, Li wrote to Ding: “Hi Linwei. The feedback from Meituan telling why you are not suitable is that they think you don’t have enough experience in GPU R&D.”
On May 21 [2023], he converted 129 files from his Notes app into PDF documents, and then uploaded them to a Google Drive folder in his personal Gmail account. He would do so again the following month and the month after that, uploading nearly 600 documents, including 55 that the government alleges are trade secrets.
After another interview that appeared promising, Li relayed feedback to Ding that suggested that his experience with AI chips was, if anything, too tailored to Google.
“I checked the feedback [from] the tech department,” Li wrote. “Google’s internal infra is mainly self developed with a high degree of integration and maturity. Employee may not be well adapted when going to other companies.”
But one connection stuck. In April 2022, Li wrote to Ding: “Hi Linwei. Mr. Yuan from Rongshu Lianzhi would like to invite you for a video chat on the morning of the 5th Beijing time.”
Mr. Yuan was Yuan Ye, the chairman of Beijing Rongshu Lianzhi Technology Co., a tech startup working at the time on privacy computing, which involved data security and encryption. Two months earlier, its technology had earned Rongshu an investment from the payments giant Ant Group, founded by Jack Ma’s Alibaba, data from WireScreen shows.
Yuan was looking for a chief technology officer. And for Ding, Yuan, with a business degree from Tsinghua University and prominent investors backing his company, looked like a strong business partner.
Ding took the call with Yuan in May 2022. That same month, prosecutors allege, Ding pilfered trade secrets from Google for the first time. On May 21, he converted 129 files from his Notes app into PDF documents, and then uploaded them to a Google Drive folder in his personal Gmail account. He would do so again the following month and the month after that, uploading nearly 600 documents, including 55 that the government alleges are trade secrets.
In June, Yuan sent a letter to Ding formally offering him the CTO job. The letter promised a base salary of 100,000 yuan ($14,000) per month. Rongshu would also help him find accommodation in Beijing. Ding accepted, and was set to begin employment at Rongshu later that fall. The two stayed in contact throughout the summer while Ding was in California.
